MARCH 26 –
Outrage over the murder of 17-year-old
Trayvon Martin compounds daily as the killer
remains free, facing no criminal charges for
gunning down the unarmed black youth from
Miami Gardens, Florida. On February 26,
George Zimmerman, 28, a white self-appointed
captain of a “neighborhood watch” team in
the Retreat at Twin Lakes, a gated community
in the Orlando suburb of Sanford, shot
Martin, a black high-school student, who
after going out to buy a bag of Skittles and
an ice tea at a convenience store was
returning to the home in the development
where he and his father were staying. As
many have noted, Trayvon
Martin was killed for the “crime” of
“walking while black.”

Police and local
prosecutors never charged Zimmerman and
accepted his cynical claim that he shot the
unarmed youth in “self-defense.” Detectives
brushed off residents who reported Martin’s
cries for help. Nor did the cops attempt to
contact neighbors to see if anyone’s son was
missing. They bought the killer’s story that
Trayvon looked “suspicious” (for having the
hood of his sweatshirt up in the rain), was
“up to no good” and “on drugs or something”
because he was “walking around looking at
stuff” (trying to find a house in an
unfamiliar neighborhood). This was “racial
profiling” like the cops do all the time. If
the killer’s story wasn’t believable, no
matter: they assumed that Trayvon was a
“perp” and a “bad guy.” End of story, case
closed.

In Miami, the reaction
was different. More than 1,000 people
attended Martin’s funeral on March 3.
Classmates, acquaintances and relatives
recalled how Tray dreamed of being a pilot
or airline mechanic (attending an aviation
school part-time) whose favorite subject was
math. An English teacher described him as
extremely creative, an A and B student who
majored in cheerfulness. The story of his
slaying was reported in the local press, one
more of so many killings of young black men,
destined to be soon forgotten. But his
parents were determined that Trayvon not be
forgotten and kept on demanding that
Zimmerman be arrested and tried for the
crime he committed.

There things stood until
mid-March when lawyers for Trayvon’s mother
and father, Sybrina Fulton and Tracey
Martin, managed to break into the national
media. Protests mushroomed particularly
after the police released their tapes of 911
calls by Zimmerman which plainly showed that
he was stalking Martin, even after being
told by the dispatcher to stop. People could
hear the killer saying about his soon-to-be
victim, “the assholes always get away.” A
listener noted Zimmerman muttering what
after enhancement sounds like a racist
epithet (“f--king c--n”) under his breath.
The evidence points to the slayer being a
racist vigilante on the prowl.

Trayvon
Martin's parents, Tracey Martin and
Sybrina Fulton at March 21 protest in
NYC's Union Square.(Photo: Michael Appleton for The
New York Times)

On March 21, the day
after the 911 tapes were released, a crowd
of over 1,000, mainly black and white young
people, showed up in Union Square Park in
New York City in response to a Facebook
appeal for a “Million Hoodie March for
Trayvon Martin.” His father vowed, “we’re
not going to stop until we get justice for
Trayvon.” More than 8,000 packed into a park
in Sanford the next night and thousands more
protested in rallies around the country
including Seattle, Portland, Chicago and
elsewhere. On March 23, students at 50
Florida schools walked out in protest, the
Miami Heat posed in team hoodies for Trayvon
and President Barack Obama lamented the
“tragedy,” but carefully tiptoed around the
central question of race.

Now that protests over
the killing of have gone mainstream, with
approval from the top, more are scheduled
this week. Church services from Harlem to
Miami Gardens this past weekend eulogized
Trayvon. As pressure mounted, the U.S.
Department of Justice quickly launched a
federal civil rights investigation and a
Florida state special attorney is
investigating. Almost two million people
have signed an on-line petition calling for
the arrest of George Zimmerman. But the main
thrust of liberals, from the New
York Times to black Democrats like
Jesse Jackson, is to divert the protests
into a movement for gun control laws and to
get rid of “Stand Your Ground” laws such as
Florida’s which make it legal to shoot in
self-defense.

The ruling-class
response deliberately tries to obscure the
key fact: the
killing of Trayvon Martin was racist
murder. It had nothing to do with
self-defense, it was a cold-blooded
execution. The first witnesses reported
Zimmerman, gun in hand, straddling his
victim who was lying face down in the grass.
Taking guns away from civilians is no
answer: the cops are far and away the
biggest racist killers in the U.S. And if
shooting in self-defense is ruled illegal,
you can bet your bottom dollar that blacks
will be the first to pay, like Long Island
father John White who was jailed for
accidentally killing a white youth in a mob
in front of his suburban house shouting
racist epithets and threatening his son in
2006.

Certainly racist
vigilantes will take advantage of “Stand
Your Ground Laws” to justify murderous
attacks. But to call for the capitalist
state to control firearms (as Jesse Jackson
did this weekend) is to suggest that the
police are or could somehow be neutral or
even favorable to the black, Latino, Asian
and immigrant population when it is in fact
the greatest force of oppression. From the
White Citizens Councils of the 1960s to
“community watch” groups today, vigilantes
get their power from their connection to the
state. And following the Monroe, North
Carolina NAACP[1]
and Bogalusa, Louisiana Deacons for Defense[2]
in the 1950s and ’60s, to fight them we
stand for the
right of black armed self-defense.

George Zimmerman is a
murderer who certainly belongs behind bars.
Even then, calling on the capitalist courts
to deliver a “fair” trial or a just verdict
only builds illusions in the racist injustice
system. So far, the state has backed up the
killer, claiming he was “squeaky clean” and
had no record, when in fact the record had
been expunged. It is possible that in this
case, the rulers will eventually give up the
killer, who is not a police officer but a
cop wannabe. For the ruling class there is
an important difference, since it seeks to
uphold a monopoly of violence in the hands
of its official thugs, in and out of
uniform.

Panoramic
view of March 22 rally of over 8,000 for
Trayvon Martin in Ft. Mellon Park,
Sanford, Florida.(Photo from Orlando Sentinnel
video)

Black residents of
Sanford were not surprised at the police
cover-up of the murder of Trayvon Martin.
Chief Bill Lee, who has now “temporarily”
stepped down under fire for his defense of
Zimmerman’s alibi and character, was
appointed to “clean up a department tainted
by racial scandals” (Miami
Herald, 21 March). In 2005, two
security guards, one the son of a longtime
Sanford police officer, the other a
department volunteer, killed a black man
they said was trying to run over them. In
2010, the police waited seven weeks to
arrest a lieutenant’s son who beat up a
homeless man, and only did so after a video
of the incident surfaced.

In this case, Trayvon
Martin’s girlfriend was not contacted by
police in their “investigation,” despite
hers being the last recorded call on his
cellphone. In an affidavit, she reported
that that he phoned her to say that a man
was following him and that he was walking
briskly, trying to get away. Another 911
call from a frightened neighbor, in whose
backyard the shooting took place, records
Trayvon in the background repeatedly
pleading for help, then silenced by a single
gunshot. Martin’s lawyers charge that the
police made a second incident report
claiming Zimmerman had a bloody nose, not
mentioned in the original report, to justify
not arresting him.

Police knew from the
beginning that, far from “standing his
ground” in self-defense, Zimmerman was a
busybody with a history of dozens of
frivolous 911 calls about “suspicious” black
people. The Miami
Herald (13 March) reported that
“Zimmerman went door-to-door asking
residents to be on the lookout, specifically
referring to young black men who appeared to
be outsiders.” Now Zimmerman has been
endowed with an Hispanic ethnic identity and
the media are running interviews with the
shooter’s neighbors saying he was a former
altar boy who helped little black children.
But whether or not he was a certified bigot,
for which there are plenty of indications,
he was a vigilante carrying out lynch law
“justice.”

And whether or not
Trayvon Martin attempted to defend himself
from his pursuer, the frightened teenager
was stalked and executed because he was
black, and his killer is free, because in
2012 in racist, capitalist America, killing
an unarmed young black man is considered a
minor offense by the authorities. It’s not
hard to imagine what the police would have
done if a young black man had shot a white
adult. There are plenty of other recent
examples of racist murders and lynchings,
notably the gang of white youths who robbed,
beat and ran over James
Craig Anderson, a middle-aged black
family man in Jackson, Mississippi in June
2011.

There was also Brandon
McClelland, killed in 2008 in the East
Texas town of Paris after being run over by
a pick-up truck and dragged by a couple of
white youth with a criminal history and ties
to white supremacist groups. Charges were
dropped for “lack of evidence” even though
they found the victim’s blood on the truck
and an admission. That case eerily resembled
the 1998 lynching-by-dragging supremacists
in another East Texas town, Jasper, of James
Byrd, Jr. by three white men, who
chained him to a pick-up truck and pulled
him for three miles, severing his head, and
then dumped his torso in front of an African
American cemetery.

Lynching and racist
murder are directed at others as well as
blacks and don’t just take place in the
South. In September 2008, an Ecuadorian
immigrant, Marcelo
Lucero, was stabbed to death by a
racist mob of youths in Patchogue, Long
Island who had gone out looking for Mexicans
to assault (what they called
“beaner-jumping”).[3]
Or there is the recent killing of Shaima
Alawadi, an Iraqi woman in San Diego
who was beaten to death in her home on this
past Wednesday, March 21. A note found by
her side read, “Go back to your own country.
You’re a terrorist.” And there are numerous
cases of lethal violence against
homosexuals, such as the 1998 torture-murder
of gay student Matthew
Shepard in Wyoming.

In 2009, Congress passed
the Matthew Shepard James Byrd, Jr. Hate
Crimes Prevention Act, but such legislation
has done nothing to curb violent racist,
sexist and homophobic attacks. How could it
be otherwise in a country where, as Student
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee leader H.
Rap Brown said in the 1960s, violence
against the oppressed is “as American as
apple pie.” And where in the vast majority
of cases, it comes straight from the police.
When it comes to the cops, America’s rulers
will stop at nothing to uphold the guard
dogs of capital, not hesitating to execute
an innocent man, as they did last September
with Troy
Davis in Georgia and as they tried to
do for three decades to class war prisoner Mumia
Abu-Jamal.

At the March 21 protest
in New York’s Union Square, some
demonstrators carried signs calling for
“Justice for Trayvon Martin and Ramarley
Graham,” referring to the 18-year-old
Bronx youth who was shot and killed in the
doorway of his bathroom by police who had
broken into his home. Naturally the cops
claimed to think he had a gun, although none
was found. Everyone recalled the 1999 police
murder of Amadou
Diallo with 41 bullets fired as he
reached for his wallet at the door to his
home; and the cop death squad which murdered
Sean
Bell in a fusillade of 50 bullets on
his wedding day in 2006. In both cases the
killer cops went free: the most that
happened to any of them was that one was
fired and lost his pension and health
benefits.

The pervasiveness of
murderous attacks on the oppressed
underscores that this is not a case of a
“lone wolf” gunman but a deep-seated social
problem. Since the time this country was
founded on the economic bedrock of chattel
slavery, racism has been part of the DNA of
American capitalism. No matter what laws are
passed, such as civil rights laws, and what
courts rule, as in the formal desegregation
of the schools, such laws and decisions are
eventually rolled back as reaction sets in.
Ultimately, it will take a socialist
revolution to put an end to racist police
brutality and lynch law murders.

In the meantime,
revolutionaries combat illusions in
bourgeois “justice” and seek to mobilize the
social forces that have the power to bring
down the system of capitalist wage slavery:
the working class marching at the head of
all the oppressed. In November 2010,
International Longshore and Warehouse Union
(ILWU) Local 10 in the San Francisco-Oakland
(California) Bay Area stopped work for a day
to protest the murder of the young black
worker Oscar Grant carried out by police on
New Year’s Day 2009. As we wrote, “the ILWU
action points toward a real mobilization of
workers’ power against the brutal enforcers
of capitalist ‘law and order’” (“ILWU Shuts
Port Demanding Justice for Oscar Grant,” Revolution
No. 8, April 2011).

George Zimmerman is
guilty as hell, and so are the capitalist
rulers of America. Their cops and courts
kill dozens of black people like Trayvon
every year. In some places, like
Albuquerque. New Mexico and Phoenix,
Arizona, the killer cops get a bounty check
from the police “union” of up to $500 for
every killing, to compensate for “stress”
(in Phoenix they give a $25 dinner card and
free movie tickets every time a cop pulls
the trigger). Most of the time they get away
with it. Zimmerman the wannabe cop was just
doing what police from coast to coast … and
what imperialist military occupiers the
world over do on an industrial scale.

NBC TV this morning
showcased back-to-back interviews by its top
reporter Matt Lauer favorably portraying
vigilante Zimmerman and then gushing over
the wife of Sgt. Robert Bales the U.S.
soldier charged with murdering 17 civilians
in the Panjwai district of Kandahar
province, Afghanistan. Yet the heinous
crimes of these murderers, for which they
should pay, come straight from the slaughter
ordered by the generals and their
commanders, right up to commander in chief
Barack Obama in the White House (like George
W. Bush, Bill Clinton and their
predecessors, mass murderers one and all).

Rather than appealing
forlornly to Obama to “do the right thing,”
we need to build a revolutionary workers
party that can sweep away the capitalist
system which produces endless lynchings and
imperialist massacres. Trayvon Martin,
Ramarley Graham, Troy Davis, Shaima Alawadi,
Marcelo Lucero, Sean Bell, Patrick
Dorismond, Anthony Baez, Malcolm Ferguson,
Amadou Diallo, Kathryn Johnston and so many
others will be avenged by workers
revolution. ■

[1]
While the bulk of the liberal-led civil
rights movement called for
turn-the-other-cheek non-violence and
looked to the federal government to aid
them, some of the most militant sectors
understood that it was necessary for
African Americans to organize their own
defense against the Ku Klux Klan
nightriders and other racists. During
1959-61, the Monroe, North Carolina
chapter of the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People, led
by Robert F. Williams organized armed
self-defense guards to protect black
neighborhoods from repeated KKK
incursions.

[2]
During 1964-68, as civil rights workers
and black voters faced terrorist assault
by the KKK, some of the more militant
sections of the NAACP, CORE and SNCC
began to take armed self-defense
measures. In Bogalusa and nearby areas
of Louisiana and Mississippi, an
organization consisting primarily of
black veterans was formed which came to
be known as the Deacons for Defense and
Justice. The Deacons provided defense
guards for a number of events, including
the 1966 March Against Fear from
Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson,
Mississippi.